Bin Laden and his myth are dead

May 3, 2011 - 0:0

It was thought that Osama bin Laden died many years ago in the Tora Bora caves and that only his legend lived on, but U.S. President Barack Obama announced on Sunday that the Al-Qaeda chief had been killed.

So, now, it appears both the man and the myth are dead.
In a pre-dawn attack in Abbottabad, 62km north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, U.S. operatives killed Bin Laden in the tourist resort of Pakistan after almost a decade since the United States launched a war on the people of Afghanistan on the pretext of capturing or killing Al-Qaeda mastermind, but the high-profile killing at this time has raised many questions.
Anyhow, let us first know what had actually happened on Monday morning in Pakistan and the importance of the place where the killing took place. Abbottabad is a small summer city surrounded by lush green hills and high-altitude mountain ranges of Kashmir. Near this city, Pakistan’s biggest military academy, known as Kakul, is situated. Roughly 500 meters from the gates of this military academy, Bin Laden was living in a three-storey house having a fortified compound. The place is only at one hour drive from Islamabad, and at half-day’s distance from the Afghan border, where previously he was thought to be hiding by the western security experts.
According to the Associated Press, CIA officials discovered the compound in August 2010 while monitoring an Al-Qaeda courier. The CIA had been hunting that courier for years, ever since detainees told interrogators that the messenger was so trusted by Bin Laden that he might very well be living with the Al-Qaeda leader.
Nestled in an affluent neighborhood, the compound was surrounded by walls as high as six meters (18 feet), topped with barbed wire. Two security gates guarded the only way in. A third-floor terrace was shielded by a 2.33-meter (seven-foot) privacy wall. No phone lines or Internet cables ran to the property. The residents burned their garbage rather than put it out for collection. The U.S. intelligence officials believed the million-dollar compound was built five years ago to protect a major terrorist figure. The question was, who?
The CIA asked itself again and again who might be living behind those walls. Each time, they concluded it was almost certainly Bin Laden.
The first question is: Why the CIA decided to assassinate Bin Laden now, and second, was Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) involved?
The answer to seconded question is, probably yes.
Last month, ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha went to the U.S. and conducted a series of meetings with CIA Director Leon Panetta and other high-ranking officials in the Pentagon, in which, it seems, was decided to get rid of Bin Laden and end the conflict in Afghanistan.
It was a joint operation in which U.S. Blackhawk helicopters ferried about two dozen troops from Navy SEAL Team Six, a top military counter-terrorism unit into the compound while Pakistani security forces cordoned off the area and also provided the air-cover in which the Pakistanis lost a helicopter and its crew. Bin Laden was shot in the head after he and his bodyguards resisted the assault. After 40 minutes of fighting, Bin Laden and an adult son, Hamza, one unidentified woman and two men were dead.
The killing of Bin Laden at this time indicates that both Pakistan and the U.S. are now interested in ending the Afghan conflict. Pakistan wants to see U.S. out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and the Obama administration has have its hands full with this war that his predecessor George W. Bush started on the pretext of hunting down Al-Qaeda chief whom his administration accused for the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York.
However, not many bought Bush administration’s argument that Bin Laden actually conducted history’s most sophisticated terrorist operation on the U.S. soil.
Many people always knew that it was an inside job or fully facilitated by the CIA and Pentagon in order to launch new wars against the Islamic countries to achieve multiple targets, like destabilizing of the Islamic world by creating ethnic and sectarian divisions, territorial conflicts, and leaving a legacy of simmering disputes in the regions of Central Asia, Southwest Asia and North Africa. The wars were also meant to boost American economy by triggering Military Industrial Complex into action and then starting a process of rebuilding the war-torn countries.
Over more, the U.S. involvement in the energy-rich regions is also meant to curtail the rise of China by denying it easy flow of energy, and ultimately aiming to remove China and Russia from the Mediterranean.
Because of the United States’ “war on terror”, Pakistan has been engulfed in the flames of extremism and terrorism, and its economy and society suffered badly due to a decade-long reckless war on its borders. So the current administration has finally decided to eliminate the cassis belly, leaving the U.S. with no option but to leave the region.